Soli stood on trembling knees. The señora dropped her smile. “What happened?”
Soli only shook her head. She didn’t want to make trouble.
“Is Saoirse okay?” She clicked across the kitchen. “Soli, tell me what happened.”
“Today is Ignacio’s birthday,” she managed to say. “He is one year.”
The señora brought both hands to her cheeks, and beamed. “Oh, my little boy!” She lurched forward and smeared Ignacio’s cheek with a badly aimed kiss. Soli caught the sharp tang of liquor. “Happy, happy birthday, my beautiful boy! Buon compleanno!”
She stumbled into the hallway, called good night to Soli, and shut her bedroom door.
The señor poured himself a glass of water, then headed for the hallway. He stopped, turned. “Oh,” he said. “Did you have something planned? For Ignacio?”
Yes, she wanted to answer. Yes, we did and we had to cancel it. A simple statement of fact, but even this felt like a battle cry. Soli tried to force the words, any words, but instead her lip began to tremble.
“Ah, jeez,” Señor Cassidy said. “Ah, jeez, Soli. I’m sorry. I— We didn’t mean it. No, we didn’t think. Shit. Shit.”
She stared dumbly at the door, doing all she could not to cry.
“C’mere.” His words ran together and his voice was hoarse. He stepped toward her and before she could move, he pulled her into a loose sort of hug. And from the warm wall of his chest rose a cloud of soap, of liquor, of whatever lay beneath the cloth of his shirt. In spite of herself, she let her head rest.
“I could give you a ride home,” he offered.
Soli looked up at him. His eyes focused on hers. He’d been drinking but was not drunk. From the hallway, a door clicked open.
The señora, sleepily. “Brett? Brett.”
He looked down at Soli. “I guess I can’t. I’m sorry.”
She picked Ignacio up from the sofa and balanced him on her chest as she fastened the Ergo. The señor reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, counting out a fan of twenties.
“For your extra time,” he said. She stared at the money but couldn’t bring herself to take it. “Take it, please. For your time.” Three twenty-dollar bills. Pride was expensive. She opened her palm and let him place them in her hand. Never had she suspected that so much money could make her feel this small.
“I’m so sorry, Soli,” he said again.
She was glad now that she could not speak. It’s okay, she might have said, if she had had the words; she never would have forgiven herself.
Soli rode the bus home, Ignacio sleeping soundly against her chest. She wished she’d brought a heavier blanket for him; the bus windows were open and the wind lashed and stung her ears. She wrapped the front of her coat around her son and squeezed him tightly, almost too tightly. “These beautiful people,” she whispered. “Their beautiful lives. They’re just people, Nacho, aren’t they?”
She lay in bed with Nacho tucked against her arm. She had no gifts for him, only dreams. She gave him the best she could muster. She tried to stay up until midnight, to mark the silent passage of one year to the next. But the street outside was quiet, her shoulders heavy, and by midnight, she too was asleep.
The next day, Soli arrived early at the Cassidys’. She wanted to establish herself in the kitchen before the señora vanished out the door. She’d woken up at dawn and lay thinking, certain that she’d have to say something to the woman—so certain that she didn’t bother asking Silvia about it, for fear that her cousin would try to dissuade her. She was equally sure that this was not the behavior of a model employee, of a benevolent domestic. When Soli arrived, the señora sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hand. Beneath clouds of rouge, her cheeks were pale. She hadn’t managed her lipstick yet, and her mouth was tinged blue at the corners. She spoke barely over a whisper.
“Margaritas are evil, Soli. I don’t know how your people can handle them.”
The chair screeched when Soli pulled it out and sat down across from her. The señora looked up, looked at the microwave clock. “You’re early.”
“I want to say something.”
She sighed. “What is it, Soli?”
Soli lost all sense of her skin. Her bones and her face seemed to hang in midair. It was what happened when she found herself about to do something risky and foolish and absolutely necessary, like climbing onto a moving train or confronting her boss lady about her drunken late arrival the previous evening.
“Señora? Yesterday was my Ignacio’s birthday.”
The señora raised an eyebrow. “I remember. I did wish him a happy birthday, didn’t I? I’m planning on getting him something, of course—”
“Yesterday it was his birthday, and we were going to have a party. For Ignacio. In the park.”
The señora’s face sank into itself. “Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit.”
“Sí.”
“We were late.”
“You said six o’clock, señora, and I waited.”
“And you missed it.”
“We will do it another day.”
The señora sat upright. “This is so typical.”
“Señora?”
“The one day I go out and have a little fun, Soli, and it turns out to be this, this debacle. I mean, look at me! Do you realize how long it’s been since I wore heels?”
Soli blinked.
“And had a real drink? You have no idea, Soli. You have no idea what motherhood is like.”
Soli had heard enough. The moving-train impulse was urging her now to stand up, pick up her her bag, and quit. She pushed her chair out and picked up her purse.
“Wait. Wait. Hold it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for saying that. Of course you know what motherhood is. That was totally out of line.”
The woman got to her feet, picked up her mug of tea, and left the room, clomping back down the hallway, shouting for her daughter. When Saoirse emerged, carrying a backpack and water bottle and lunch box, the señora led her out the kitchen door, without another word to Soli.
Soon after, the señor entered the kitchen, his hair slick with water, shower heat still steaming from his neck and hands. He nodded at Soli, who stood now at the kitchen sink.
“Doing all right, Solimar?”
“Yes, señor.”
“Gretchen seemed a little upset. Everything okay?”
“Maybe she’s upset, señor. I told her that Ignacio had a party yesterday. That he missed the party.”
“And she wasn’t happy about that.”
“No.”
“Did she apologize?”
Soli wasn’t sure.
A long pause followed, during which no one said what they wanted to say.
And then: “Being a mom hasn’t been easy for her, Solimar.”
She turned off the tap and waited.
“Come here a sec. Have a seat.”
She picked Ignacio up off his play mat and brought him to the table. It felt good to sit down.
“You probably don’t want to know all this,” he said. “But she’s had a hard time of it, overall. Getting pregnant, which took a long time. Years. And then depression after Saoirse was born. Mild depression, but it was still hard. And then not getting to get back to work for a good long while. And then, you know, she’s tired, Solimar. She’s almost fifty, you know. You probably can’t tell. But we just don’t have the energy someone like—like you would have.”
This must have been a category of hardship that Soli simply didn’t understand because, quite simply, none of the señora’s difficulties sounded terribly difficult.
“And to tell you the truth,” he spoke in a stage whisper, “we can barely afford you. But in the end, you’re cheaper than divorce.”
Soli didn’t want to know what she was cheaper than. A hard spike of anger
was pushing through her now, and only by focusing all her strength on the soft whorl of Nacho’s hair did she manage to keep herself quiet. She kissed the top of his head and sang Caballito, Caballito, no me tumba, no me tumba, as the señor continued to talk. The soft spot on his head was hardening now, with every passing week. He remained wholly unaware that his birthday had come and gone.
“But none of that matters, Solimar,” he continued. “The point is, we let you down. We said we’d be home by a certain time, and we weren’t. And that was our mistake.” He wrapped his hand around hers. She pulled away. Pride, like a cornstalk, had grown inside her.
“Thank you, señor.”
When Brett Cassidy made his way around the kitchen and said goodbye for the day, Soli found her way to the living room sofa and sat there for a good hour, watching Ignacio crawl around the room, press buttons on the television, and try to bend his feet into his mouth. She thought back to that day she’d sat on this very sofa, watching the señora’s birth video. There’s stuff you need to see, the señora had said. Soli realized now what she had meant. Motherhood, from its first seconds, is woven with hurt. But what else had she meant? That Soli would be alone? That she’d face it all without a husband, without friends, without the support of either partner or parents?
• • •
“YOU’RE OVERREACTING,” Silvia said.
Overreaction or not, her dissatisfaction was planted and sprouting quickly.
“But why?” Soli asked. “Why didn’t she say sorry?”
Silvia stood in their own family room, coiling the serpent of her vacuum hose around her elbow.
“If I knew how these people worked, they’d be doing my laundry.”
Silvia had started calling her Soli Poppins, and Soli expected to hear it now, Pobrecita, Pobre Soli Poppins! But instead, Silvia put down the vacuum. She walked over and placed her hands on Soli’s shoulders. “And listen up, Miss Muy-Muy. Don’t walk around judging these people. And if you do—and you will, of course—don’t let yourself think about it. They’ll sense it. If you think they’re lazy, they will know. If you think a husband is cheating on his wife, he will know. They don’t like to be judged by the people who scrub their pots. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Even if they want to know, they don’t want to know.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t be anyone’s conscience.”
“Okay.”
• • •
MAMA CALLED THAT WEEKEND.
“Soli, let me tell you. Doña Alberta’s house? The new big one?”
“Did you go?”
“No. And I’ll tell you why. The house? It’s a dud.”
Soli could hear her mother’s smile.
“It turns out, the Doña’s still waiting for her plumbing and her light. No electricity, no water. The municipality hasn’t got around to it yet.”
“But did she bribe them?”
“Of course she bribed them!”
“You don’t know that,” she heard Papi say in the background.
“Imagine it, Soli. Every day she sweeps her new house, looks up at the window to the sky, sits on her new front patio. And then at night, she goes back to her old hut out back. It’s too heartbreaking to even think of!”
Her mother didn’t sound heartbroken. Nacho began to wail, and Soli said goodbye.
22.
Kavya and Rishi were instructed to make a book. “Put your best foot forward,” the private agency had said. “Think of yourselves as a vacation destination and this book as your brochure.”
Rishi had never thought of himself or his wife or their life as a vacation, though by some standards it was. Their mission was to create a book with pictures and descriptive captions that would give a bio-mom (the counselor’s term, not Rishi’s) a good idea of what life with the Reddys would be like for her child. This was Kavya’s territory, not his.
“Why is this any more my job than yours?” she’d asked.
“You’re the creative one.”
“Who said I’m the creative one?” And then as they sat outside the Cheeseboard, Kavya had started to cry. The corn-cherry scone had turned to sand in his mouth.
Since they’d decided to adopt, Kavya’s sorrow and her elation could boil up in an instant, sometimes the same instant. She was more erratic than she’d been during her hormone treatments, and Rishi was getting tired. He had no desire to pretend that life in his home would be a vacation.
But for the sake of a pregnant, luckless bio-mom, and for his teetering wife, Rishi was willing to create a work of fiction. But where to begin? With himself? Not the best idea.
Rishi had a good cocktail-party job. In response to the inevitable What do you do? he’d say he worked in healthy buildings and energy, that he managed energy efficiency and air quality in the buildings at Weebies. In a town with a Prius problem and a crush on all things tech, this won him smiles, admiration, nods and more questions, shared stories, opinions, drinks. When people inevitably asked for specifics, he started to run into trouble.
“I work in indoor air quality,” he’d begin. And then he’d try to synopsize his work with Contam, window-opening behavior, particulate concentrations and their impacts on occupant health, until his voice fell from party volume to an almost conspiratorial whisper, his descriptions growing increasingly complex, his synopsis getting less and less synoptic as his listeners leaned in, their brows furrowing, their eyes darting to the exits. What he needed was Kavya by his side, minding his verbal spelunking, keeping him concise. If not for love or lust or financial codependence, he needed Kavya for her tidy summations of his life’s work.
“He uses software to measure air flow at Weebies,” she’d say, “to make sure they ventilate enough but aren’t wasting energy.” If the connection seemed worthwhile, Kavya would proffer one of Rishi’s business cards, a few of which she kept in her wallet. And yes, the business cards read “Ventilation Engineer,” and yes, she and Rishi both agreed that the title sounded like a trumped-up name for an a/c repairman, but Rishi could tell that Kavya was proud of him nonetheless, and this made the cleaving of his heart to hers all the more intractable. When his wife took charge, his listeners leaned back again, unfurled their brows, visibly relaxed. They understood. Rishi was a scientist. Rishi was saving the world.
And because it made things easier for everyone, Rishi stuck to Kavya’s version. He wouldn’t trouble her with the truth of what he did, a truth which didn’t involve lab coats or clipboards. He worked in airflow, yes, but rarely did he encounter an actual gust of air in his beige building. What he really worked in were borders, the passage of air across them. He worked also in illusion, the brash belief that such borders could be patrolled, that the passage of something so essential and free as air could be managed by a mortal with a laptop. And these days, he worked in possibility, weighing the expectations of a man like Vikram Sen against the limits of physical reality. He hadn’t told Kavya about this new project, or even that Sen had reached out to him, for so many reasons that he had trouble pinning one down.
• • •
HE TURNED BACK to his computer screen. He would filter the best of everything, and compile for Kavya, for the bio-mom, for an unknown child, a cohesive and neatly bound life. For Kavya, he did this: He burrowed to the back of their bedroom closet and pulled out a file box that he’d been always vaguely aware of, but never expected to open himself. It held stacks, surprisingly weighty, of photographs. He looked through pictures from Berkeley, from their wedding, from their honeymoon and early years of marriage, and soon realized that the photos they’d taken of each other had all started to look the same: sun-splashed, toothy, drinks in hand, at weddings, on deck chairs, their own faces clustered like peonies with the faces of forgotten friends. He compiled pages of pictures, and beside them, in a logical, if not esthetically inspired sequence, he listed their accomplish
ments and bullet-pointed the highlights of their lifestyle and their neighborhood. The Gourmet Ghetto was mentioned, and so were playgrounds, schools, and farmers’ markets. He chose pictures of them at their happiest. He chose the winningest of their winning smiles and plastered them across that book, so often that the volume as a whole took on the slightest breath of desperation.
Looking through his finished work, he began to understand: He and Kavya had ridden their youth to its final conclusion, wound their days together over a spool of parties and friends and travel. It was time now to take the next step.
23.
“Nacho,” she’d sing every day into the crown of his head, almost without noticing. “Naaaaacho . . .” Late mornings at the Cassidys’, when no one was home, she held Ignacio to her chest and sang him the songs from home. She’d carried them with her, lodged in her throat. Popocalco seemed unreachable now, a corner of another galaxy. And though her parents phoned her and she phoned them, her unspoken child had closed a very heavy door between Berkeley, California, and the place called home.
That afternoon, they made their way up a small hill, to Gooseberries, the preschool. In the yard, the mothers and fathers gathered in clusters, waiting for the front doors to open, and for the teachers, like plump ringleaders, to raise their arms in greeting. Soli stood at the edge of the gathering; they knew one another well by now, the pickup parents, and they chatted and let their children run circles on the concrete.
When they saw Ignacio, the mothers gasped and cooed, they spoke in squeaks and whispers. The fathers called him buddy and poked gentle fingers into his grasp. To Saoirse, they gave big hellos, high fives. The younger fathers gave her fist bumps.
What Soli would have given for a fist bump.
It’s not that they didn’t smile. It’s not that they didn’t say hello. The first day she’d shown up at Saoirse’s school, the parents had smiled at her. The second day, the parents had smiled at her. The third day, a mother had walked over to her.
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